Polytheism, belief in the
existence of many gods or divine beings. It has been widespread in human
cultures, past and present, and has taken many forms. Natural forces
or objects have been identified with deities, as have plants and animals.
The assumption of human forms and characteristics by divine beings (anthropomorphism)
also is virtually a universal feature of polytheism. Many polytheistic
religions, such as Hinduism and ancient Egyptian
religion, tend toward monotheism, the belief in and worship of one god
or divine power, and polytheistic beliefs and practices sometimes coexist
with an essentially monotheistic theology.

The emperor Julian sustains a mortal
wound June 26 in a battle with the Persians. The last champion of polytheism,
he is succeeded by the captain of his imperial bodyguard, Flavius Iovianus,
32, who will reign for 7 months as the emperor Jovian.

since there is no objective truth,
and everything is a shared and consensual hallucination, my preference is that
of polytheism.

monotheism came about in wanting
an answer. we ask questions, and we want a comforting, soothing caretaker.
so we invent a version of reality
and force it down others' throats. the "god" of monotheism is defined
as all knowing, all seeing, all enveloping. i simply laugh
at this notion. it's just bad taste, like bad art.

others excuse this infantilism
by claiming that there is a "god within". hogwash. i'd rather live
in a world where each defines their own deities. they do anyway.
the wars and arguments start when one claims their version to be some sort of
objective truth.

The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian
Power by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad

"One of the longest experiments
in history, the approximately 3,000-year-old Eastern ideology of Oneness, was
first developed in the Upanishads. . . . The failure of its renunciate morality
to diminish self-centeredness is a powerful statement that something is amiss.
. . . It is our contention that this morality has failed not because there is
something wrong with people, but because the framework constructs ideals that
are impossible to achieve, thus setting people up for failure and self-mistrust."

"The ideal of enlightenment
at first blush seems completely innocent of human corruption because it
is defined as being totally selfless. Yet it is this sacrosanct concept
of perfection that allows authoritarianism to manifest, and indeed flourish."

"Monotheism with one god
on top is obviously authoritarian. The authoritarianism embedded within
the Eastern ideology of Oneness is less obvious. . . . Whereas monotheism
makes the revealed Word of god sacred, Eastern religions make presumed
enlightened beings sacred. Thus the concept of enlightenment brings authoritarianism
at the personal, charismatic level (gurus, masters, avatars,
and buddhas)."

"Accepting selflessness as the highest
value is where the insidious authoritarianism of the old order unwittingly seeps
into many modern paradigms that attempt to be new."

On his recent visit to China,
"President" Bush informed his hosts that "95% of Americans", including
the president, believed in god. While those figures may be accurate in
the same way that the Florida presidential election results in 2000 were
accurate, he is right in saying that a much larger percentage of Americans
believe in god, heaven and hell than most other nationalities do.

The attorney general John
Ashcroft, who comes from the Pentecostal wing of the christian church,
informed a recent gathering of christian broadcasters that "civilised people
- Muslims, christians and Jews - all understand that the source of freedom
and human dignity is the creator." Since the current war is being fought
on behalf of "civilisation", this would seem to indicate that those 5%
who do not believe in God should now also be classified as the enemy.

Certainly, faith in god has
often been linked to patriotism in the US through the pledge of allegiance,
which contains the words "I pledge allegiance to the flag ... one nation
under god." But god is, in fact, a relative newcomer to the pledge and
was only included in it because of a right-wing religious lobby's efforts
during the McCarthyite era.

The original pledge was written
in 1892 by a Baptist socialist minister, Francis Bellamy, and was first
published in a magazine called the Youth's Companion. The magazine's editor
had hired Bellamy after the latter had been sacked by his church for delivering
controversial socialist statements from the pulpit. Bellamy had even considered
including the word "equality" in the pledge but knew that the state superintendents
of education would be unwilling to endorse something that hinted at equal
rights for women and blacks.

It was more than 60 years
later, in 1954, that Congress, at the height of the anticommunist McCarthy
period, added the words "under god" following a campaign by a rightwing
Catholic organisation, the Knights of Columbus. Bellamy's grand-daughter
later said that Bellamy would have resented the words being added, not
least because at the end of his life he had become disenchanted with organised
religion and had stopped attending church in Florida because of racial
bigtory.

I learned all this from a
reader's letter in the Santa Ynez Valley News. The person who wrote the
letter, Jim Farnum, turned out to be a local businessman and community
activist in the small town of Los Olivos, in southern California. He explained
that many Americans believed that the pledge had been written by the founding
fathers.

What is disturbing about
the way in which people's beliefs - or lack of them - are being drafted
into the national debate is the level of assumptions that are taking place.
The "civilised people" in John Ashcroft's phrase and the 95 per cent of
the president's believers include many who are highly selective about the
commandments they obey - thou shalt not kill being the most obvious example.

But perhaps an indication
of the dangers inherent in marrying church to state came from a very unexpected
source over the weekend: the late President Nixon, who himself had come
to power in the wave of 50s McCarthyism. Nixon received much succour during
his time in office and his prosecution of the Vietnam war from evangelist
Billy Graham, perhaps the one person seen as closest to god by Americans
and a man who threw his weight behind the war in Vietnam.

The release of old tape-recorded
conversations between the two men reveal Graham to have been an antisemite
and a hypocrite. Graham talked about what he saw as a Jewish domination
of the media and complained about the way Jews "swarm" around him: "this
stranglehold has got to be broken down or this country's going down the
drain," he told the then president, who agreed with him and complained
that he could not say so in public.

"But if you get elected a second
time, then we might be able to do somthing," said Graham, who apologised last
weekend for his remarks, which he did not recall making. Interesting what "civilised"
people get up to when they think no one is listening.

In a sense the network
takes the ritual place of the gods. As Gil writes, 'the gods can do what people
can't do. They can make energy circulate freely, since they embody both loose
and overcoded energy, the loosest and most overcoded of all'. This is why we
still find magic
- or at least something that is effectively like magic - at the heart of any
exercise of power. Thus the importance of Chris Chesher’s concepts of
‘invocational media’ and ‘invocational aesthetic’ within
computing. Indeed, the ambiguity of the relations between ‘secular’
and variations of ‘spiritualist’ magic have long been an under-recognised
part of media/technological development (as recently documented with regard
to the nineteenth development of the cinema and the entertainment industries
in general by Simon During).

_Courtald Talks_ (1989) by Killing
Joke - Jaz
Coleman delivers a monologue and is eventually backed by constant percussion
and sporadic guitar. His talk on demonology and numerology suggests that only
the present day magician
(sometimes masquerading as musician,) can hope to survive the imminent arrival
of the "elder gods."

"It does me no injury for my neighbor
to say there are twenty gods, or no god."-
Thomas
Jefferson